Film Review: 'Joker: Folie à Deux' wastes Lady Gaga in predictable fare
Joaquin Phoenix on the set of the Joker sequel. Picture: Todd Phillips, Instagram
- Joker: Folie à Deux
- ★★☆☆☆
Five years ago to the week, won the coveted Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, surprising audiences and critics alike. In all likelihood, returning to the festival this year will be less successful for the comic book sequel despite an 11-minute standing ovation at its premiere on Wednesday.
The first had its detractors but at least it subverted expectations and gave Joaquin Phoenix a platform to produce one of the best performances in recent memory as the down-on-his-luck Arthur Fleck, for which he duly won his first Academy award.
Phoenix imposingly reprises his role in , but the film itself is mostly predictable fare, bringing little new to the table. Director Todd Phillips mishmashes three distinct genres together (evidently biting off more than he can chew) and not one is wholly successful.
The decision to set the production almost entirely in two locations is odd considering the original felt like a portent for an explosive second chapter. Fleck jumps between the Arkham State Hospital, where Brendan Gleeson’s guard Jackie makes sure no inmate ever gets too comfortable, and a Gotham courthouse, where Fleck is finally given a whiff of freedom.
This was an opportunity for to expand, go bigger, conquer all side-by-side with his new beau and become what he has always been known as: the clown prince of crime. Instead, rather inexplicably, it downscales. Some sequels benefit from downsizing — , for example — but this is not one.
Amid the cinematic sins, perhaps the most grievous is the criminal underuse of Lady Gaga, essentially reduced to a secondary role when most assumed she would be a mainstay alongside Phoenix.
She sings, but never truly gets a moment to showcase her iconic voice. In a film with many musical numbers, it borders on absurd that Gaga doesn’t have at least one spectacular segment.
The burgeoning romance between Fleck and Gaga’s Lee (a much less entertaining and destructive version of DC villain Harley Quinn) is one of the film’s highlights but it is never allowed elbow room to the point that we are actually rooting for the deadly duo.
Phillips’ attempts at Golden Age musical homage are cursory at best, with the exception of a scene that takes place atop the mock-up ‘Arkham Hotel’. Furthermore, the staging and choreography are uninspired.
Director of photography Lawrence Sher had cited Francis Ford Coppola's (1982) as a source of visual inspiration for the film but doesn’t possess anything like the visual inventiveness that Coppola’s own ode to classic Hollywood musicals has.
Ultimately, the nihilism and hopelessness of it all just gets a little tiresome. Across two rather mean-spirited films of two-hour-plus runtimes, it all becomes too much. Arthur Fleck just can’t take it anymore. That sentiment is shared.
